This time a month ago on the Reading group, we were hunting for the meaning of “Kafkaesque”. We were marvelling at its many applications and at just how often - and with how many subtle and not so subtle variations – the term is used and abused. But now that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is our subject, I realise that musing over the meaning of “Kafkaesque” is little more than wandering in the foothills. It is a diversion for amateurs. It is a dipping of toes into shallow waters compared to the deep black plunge that is attempting to define “Orwellian”.

This is a word that no less an organ than the New York Times has declared “the most widely used adjective derived from the name of a modern writer … It’s more common than ‘Kafkaesque,’ ‘Hemingwayesque’ and ‘Dickensian’ put together. It even noses out the rival political reproach ‘Machiavellian’, which had a 500-year head start.”

What’s more, as well as being a word that is overused, over-stretched and hotly disputed, Orwellian is further complicated because it has two contradictory strands of meaning. It is both a compliment and an insult. If you call a person an Orwellian, they generally like it. If, however, you refer to something they’re doing as Orwellian – and by extension a bit like all that horrible stuff in Nineteen Eighty-Four – odds are you aren’t aiming for their Christmas card list.

First, the positive. The renown of Orwell’s name is well demonstrated in the Orwell prize, a prestigious UK award for journalists who turn “political writing into an art”. But good luck trying to find any definite meaning for Orwellian from a prize that has been awarded to the former Conservative MP Matthew Parris, the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee and the infamous Johann Hari to name just three.

Elsewhere, Orwellian is applied as a personal compliment in all manner of circumstances.

A telling example comes up during a fascinating talk about Orwell from Christopher Hitchens. In this podcast from the rightwing American organisation the Library of Economics and Liberty, the interviewer tries to suggest that Hitchens is a good Orwellian for supporting the war in Iraq. This makes an odd kind of sense. Hitchens, in his mind at least, was both standing up to fascism and refusing to be cowed by leftwing popular opinion, just as Orwell fought Franco in the Spanish Civil War, but also risked ostracism - not to mention quite a few publishing deals - by proclaiming the truth about Stalin.

But plenty would argue that the anti-imperialist socialist Orwell would never have supported George W Bush’s vision of American empire. Clearly, the term is used selectively and subjectively. If you say that someone is Orwellian in character, the chances are that this person is on your side and jolly good too. Just as – to move on to the second strand of meaning – saying anything else is “Orwellian” means it is something that you dislike.

Certainly, that’s the impression I got after I tried to look the term up. First of all, I did a search here on the Guardian website, where the word seems to appear at least once a day. Top of the list is Edward Snowden, of course, and his revelations about the surveillance state. But there are also left-wingers accusing Osborne of describing the economy in Orwellian terms, there are Tories accusing Cameron of being Orwellian and employing “low political calculation” for promoting equal rights, there are Republicans accusing the NHS of being Orwellian for imposing financial caps on the value of human life. And yes, I know that the stories that circulated in America about death panels have plenty of affinity with the high-grade nonsense the authorities in Nineteen Eighty-Four pass off as newspeak. But of course, war is peace, truth is lies. If you want people to be consistent when evoking Orwell, you’re onto a loser.

From a few minutes’ five minutes’ research, I can tell you that we live in Orwellian times, America is waging Orwellian wars, that TV is Orwellian, that the police are Orwellian, that Amazon is Orwellian, that publishers are Orwellian too, that Amazon withdrew copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was Orwellian (although Orwell wouldn’t like it), that Vladimir Putin, George W Bush, David Cameron, Ed Milliband, Kim Jong-un and all his relatives are Orwellian, that the TV programme Big Brother is both Orwellian and not as Orwellian as it claims to be, that Obama engages in Obamathink, that climate-change deniers and climate change scientists are Orwellian, that neoclassical economics employs Orwellian language. That, in fact, everything is Orwellian.

Books such as Milovan Djila’s the New Class and George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 became clandestine bestsellers, for they depicted in minute detail the communist methodology of taking over a nation. These three books did more to open the eyes of the blind, including mine, than any other form of expression.

Pretty quickly, conifer2 stepped in to say that 1984 is actually about “an elitist takeover of a nation” – to which ElQuioxte replied:

1984 is no such thing. It is about communist totalitarianism.

To give both posters credit, that turned into an interesting and thought-provoking thread about the intentions of 1984 - but it also points to a wider truth. Many on the right think Orwell speaks for them and they speak for Orwell. Many on the left think the equal and opposite. Plenty in the middle feel the same. Orwell is rightly praised as a prophet, a teller of uncomfortable truths and a writer who has changed the way we see and talk about the world. But most of us read into him what we want to see. He may hold up a mirror to the world - but our own faces tend to get in the way.